“Twins and Doubles” – A Radio Programme on The Forum, BBC World Service

The Singh Twins are two sisters who are not only identical twins, but have created a successful career as a single artist. They will be telling us what it means to interpret the world through double vision. Also, psychologist Nancy Segal who has been studying identical Chinese twins separated at birth, and Nicholas Royle, a novelist and professor of literature, takes us into the unsettling world of doubles and alter egos in fiction.

I have not heard the Singh sisters speak before and found them to be fascinating interviewers. Nancy Segal’s new book, Born Together, Raised Apart(2013) gives an account of her work with the Minnesota twin study, receiving this rather tough response from Michael Rossi in the LRB. She provides some interesting arguments about why zygosity testing should be discounted for twins. Nick Royle, despite conflating the Freudian ‘uncanny’, ‘the double’, and other alter-egos with the biologically-specific phenomena of twinship (listen to how he historicises the double with respect to self-consciousness and Romanticism – hence ‘disturbance’, ‘dissonance’, ‘alienation’ – along with the technology of photography. Love how Segal takes him to task on this!). Royle was a tutor at Sussex while I was undergraduate there and prompted me to write a dissertation about Shakespeare’s twins, so I owe a debt to him and his book The Uncanny.